]]>Check out the GeOMe repository, great work by our GBWG colleagues! The Genomic Observatories Metadatabase (GeOMe, http://www.geome-db.org/) is an open access repository for geographic and ecological metadata associated with biosamples and genetic data. Whereas public databases have served as vital repositories for nucleotide sequences, they do not accession all the metadata required for ecological or evolutionary analyses. GeOMe fills this need, providing a user-friendly, web-based interface for both data contributors and data recipients. The interface allows data contributors to create a customized yet standard-compliant spreadsheet that captures the temporal and geospatial context of each biosample. These metadata are then validated and permanently linked to archived genetic data stored in the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s (NCBI’s) Sequence Read Archive (SRA) via unique persistent identifiers. By linking ecologically and evolutionarily relevant metadata with publicly archived sequence data in a structured manner, GeOMe sets a gold standard for data management in biodiversity science.
]]>Expanding MIxS Standards to Genomes from Uncultivated Microorganismshttp://press3.mcs.anl.gov/gensc/publications/expanding-mixs-standards-to-genomes-from-uncultivated-microorganisms/
Thu, 10 Aug 2017 07:23:27 +0000http://press3.mcs.anl.gov/gensc/?p=1488…

]]>Two new checklists, Minimum information about a single amplified genome (MISAG) and a metagenome-assembled genome (MIMAG) of bacteria and archaea, have just been published in Nature Biotechnology!

The checklists were conceived by Tanja Woyke Robert Bowers of JGI. These extensions complement the MIxS suite of metadata standards by defining the key data elements pertinent for describing the sampling and sequencing of single-cell genomes and genomes from metagenomes, and they open up a whole new area of metadata data exploration as the vast majority of microbes, referred to as microbial dark matter, are currently not described within the MIxS standard.